Edmund Blair B. posted an article on Babel's Dawn - Dec 20, 2011, 9:23 pm
One of the big quarrels in the study of speech origins is over whether it is relatively new (about 100,000 years) or decently old (millions of years). This blog has consistently leaned toward the old origins story. Basically, every time there is evidence of a complex genetic history, it'...
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Edmund Blair B. posted an article on Babel's Dawn - Dec 5, 2011, 7:35 pm
Italian Philosopher and hero on this blog, Giorgio Marchetti, has posted a comment and prescis of Babel's Dawn on his website here.
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Edmund Blair B. posted an article on Babel's Dawn - Nov 22, 2011, 7:20 pm
A regular commenter on this blog, Janet Kwasniak, has done me the kindness of reviewing the book on her own fine blog ("A blog on consciouness"): If you are at all interested in language, human nature, evolution, culture (and I expect many of my readers are interested in that type of su...
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Edmund Blair B. posted an article on Babel's Dawn - Oct 30, 2011, 11:45 pm
Dawn comes up in Kenya's Masai Mara National Reserve. I've held many consulting positions while working on this blog but now I have one that includes 4 hours of commuting each day, meaning that most of my non-working life is put on hold for the weekends, especially during World Series we...
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Edmund Blair B. posted an article on Babel's Dawn - Oct 23, 2011, 11:45 pm
Some news that I've been waiting for seems to have come along. If so, a number of puzzles may have solutions and some suspicions I've held seem likely to be true. The news appears to be a confirmation of an idea put forth a couple of years ago by Terrence Deacon and which, when I heard i...
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Edmund Blair B. posted an article on Babel's Dawn - Oct 16, 2011, 11:45 pm
Last Tuesday (Oct. 11, the feast of St. Jerome) was International Translation Day. By chance on that day somebody gave me a link to an item in the Paris newspaper Le Figraro and, when clicked, the link jumped me to a Google translation of the article. As usual, every sentence of the tran...
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Edmund Blair B. posted an article on Babel's Dawn - Oct 9, 2011, 11:45 pm
What shall we talk about? One of the greatest satisfactions of writing this blog for five years (and I hope also of reading it) has been the much sharper understanding I gained about how language works. As a professional writer my whole adult life (and an apprentice writer for most of my...
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Edmund Blair B. posted an article on Babel's Dawn - Oct 8, 2011, 3:37 pm
  I spoke last Tuesday at an event sponsored by the Science Writers in New York (SWINY).and now I've managed to put the lecture together in a series of videos. I got some compliments on the slides I used and include them in the video. If you cannot start them by clicking the image above...
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Edmund Blair B. posted an article on Babel's Dawn - Oct 3, 2011, 8:07 pm
DON'T FORGET. If you are in New York City on Tuesday October 4, I'd love to meet you. Come to my prsentation on traveling from mainiaining a blog (this one) to producing a book. Date: Tuesday Oct. 4 Time: 6 p.m. Location: 3 Park Avenue (x 34 St), 22nd Floor, Ameri...
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Edmund Blair B. posted an article on Babel's Dawn - Oct 3, 2011, 2:04 am
Genes and how they work may be the hottest dispute in biology right now, and since most other questions in biology cannot be settled until the gene question is resolved, everybody is marking time just now. I'm reminded of this point by a paper just published in the online journal¸ Biolinguistics. T...
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Edmund Blair B. posted an article on Babel's Dawn - Sep 25, 2011, 11:45 pm
See you next Sunday with the post I had planned to put up today.
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Edmund Blair B. posted an article on Babel's Dawn - Sep 20, 2011, 9:33 pm
The Science Writers in  New York (SWINY) group is sponsoring an event celebrating my new book, Babel's Dawn. Date: Tuesday Oct. 4 Time: 6 p.m. Location: 3 Park Avenue (x 34 St), 22nd Floor, American Society of Mechanical Engineers, New York, NY Cost: ...
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Edmund Blair B. posted an article on Babel's Dawn - Sep 18, 2011, 11:45 pm
This post marks five years of blogging. Usually on my anniversary post I summarize what I've learned so far. But since I've just  published a book setting forth everything I've learned, I'm celebrating this year's anniversary by taking  the day off.
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Edmund Blair B. posted an article on Babel's Dawn - Sep 11, 2011, 11:45 pm
Giants of poetry stand as an illustration of how intertwined language and being human are. I'm tired of theories that ignore the mix. I read a technical article the other day that discussed a way of evolving language without needing to cooperate. (The paper is available online, here.) Wh...
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Edmund Blair B. posted an article on Babel's Dawn - Sep 8, 2011, 10:00 am
The latest issue of Science, just published, devotes several papers to a consideration of Australopithecus sediba, a species identified in southern Africa and dated to between 1.95 and 1.76 million years ago. When the species was identified in 2008 I wasn't much interested because the genus Homo was...
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Edmund Blair B. posted an article on Babel's Dawn - Sep 4, 2011, 11:45 pm
The porch on the Acropol Hotel in Morogoro, Tanzania. A friend recently told me I used to pontificate there on the subject of language origins. I remember the pontificiating, but not the topic. (This photo of New Acropol Hotel is courtesy of TripAdvisor ) This Tuesday, the 6th of Septemb...
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Edmund Blair B. posted an article on Babel's Dawn - Sep 4, 2011, 12:57 pm
Encephalon, the monthly anthology of blog  posts has just been published and includes te Babel's Dawn post on Chomsky's presentation in Cologne which I titled "Does Language Exist." Check out the whole anthology here.
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Edmund Blair B. posted an article on Babel's Dawn - Aug 31, 2011, 5:54 pm
Nature is reporting the discovery of Acheulean "hand axe" tools dating back to 1.76 million years ago, making them the oldest known examples of such tools. Even more exciting, they were found in the company of Oldowan flake tools, suggesting that these newfound tools are part of the transition from ...
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Edmund Blair B. posted an article on Babel's Dawn - Aug 28, 2011, 11:45 pm
Dancing (movement with sound) is universal in human cultures, but the form it takes is not. There is an argument to made against the proposition that language exists, or at least exists in the sense of being something that can be studied. It says that individual languages can be studied,...
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Edmund Blair B. posted an article on Babel's Dawn - Aug 21, 2011, 11:45 pm
  I'm focused on my book right now and am letting the blog version of Babel's Dawn slide a bit, but I've made another video about the book, which you are welcome to watch. When is a book not a book? When, like Babel's Dawn, it's a tour of a natural history museum!. Bart de ...
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Edmund Blair B. posted an article on Babel's Dawn - Aug 14, 2011, 11:45 pm
Einstein in his favorite hat. Einstein disagreed with Chomsky over how symbols work. Sixty minutes into his Cologne lecture, Chomsky discusses the elementary unit of meaningful language. What is it? He says the standard answer is "comes from the referentialist doctrine." Tiger refers to ...
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Edmund Blair B. posted an article on Babel's Dawn - Aug 13, 2011, 7:42 pm
Wow! Things are moving quickly. My book is officially to be published on Sept. 6, but it has begun arriving in stores and is available today.
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Edmund Blair B. posted an article on Babel's Dawn - Aug 9, 2011, 6:11 pm
  I've made another video presentation about my book. This one is an answer to skeptics who might react to the title by doubting that there is anything to say about speech origins. For those who prefer to read, the video transcript is below. If you are having trouble with the embedded v...
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Edmund Blair B. posted an article on Babel's Dawn - Aug 8, 2011, 9:05 pm
PNAS has just published a paper on Spontaneous Prosocial Chooice by Chimpanzees. It is a little off topic for this blog but the role of cooperation in the evolutiion of language is so central to this blog that I want to bring my readers' attention to anything that challengnes the thesis. Although, r...
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Edmund Blair B. posted an article on Babel's Dawn - Aug 7, 2011, 11:45 pm
Our universe is said to have begun in a big bang. Might language have begun the same way.\? In his lecture to the University of Cologne, Noam Chomsky gives language's start a window of from 50 to 100 thousand years ago. I think that is absurdly late, but part of that difference may refle...
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Edmund Blair B. posted an article on Babel's Dawn - Jul 31, 2011, 11:45 pm
  Noam Chomsky lectures on the existence of language The University of Cologne has posted a couple of videos of lectures by Noam Chomsky, one of them on language. The language lecture is titled What Is Special About Language? The lecture runs a bit over an hour and a follow ...
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Edmund Blair B. posted an article on Babel's Dawn - Jul 24, 2011, 11:45 pm
A naive observer might say this is a group of people strung out one after another,  but someone more familiar with lines will know there is some kind of more complex social hierarchy here. Getting to handle such things was part of our history.. The current issue of the online journal Bi...
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Edmund Blair B. posted an article on Babel's Dawn - Jul 17, 2011, 11:54 pm
I got into the matter of language origins initially because I rejected the possibility of an infinite regress. Could it be, however, that infinite repeitition is the key to language after all? The online journal, Biolinguistics, has published an issue devoted to the matter of recursion, ...
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Edmund Blair B. posted an article on Babel's Dawn - Jul 15, 2011, 11:01 pm
I've posted another video about the Babel's Dawn project. If you cannot click it and get it going you can find it here. For those of you who prefer reading, the transcrip is below: I was raised loving libraries. I got my first library card when I was six years old. My eighth ...
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Edmund Blair B. posted an article on Babel's Dawn - Jul 12, 2011, 11:39 am
This post first appeared on the Scientific American website as a guest blog post. You can still check it out here and see the comments it inspired. The most important sign language study done with an ape was surely the first one back in the 1960s, with Washoe, for it established that ch...
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Edmund Blair B. posted an article on Babel's Dawn - Jul 12, 2011, 11:24 am
The New York Times today has a report that includes this passage: As in many other animals, communication among spotted hyenas serves different functions, including individual identification, recruitment of allies, reinforcement of social bonds among individual clan members, indication...
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Edmund Blair B. posted an article on Babel's Dawn - Jul 10, 2011, 9:42 pm
Scientific American has been generous enough to let this week's post appear first on its website. I review the new documentary film Project Nim and propose, "The movie makes it clear that Nim had a nightmare life — the side that I expect most reviewers to discuss—but it also indicates that th...
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Edmund Blair B. posted an article on Babel's Dawn - Jul 3, 2011, 11:45 pm
Genes used to be imagined as beads on a string, each one distinct from the other. Now they are thought of as points in a  network of connections. We pause now to think  what the change in  metaphors implies. The story of speech/language origins can be told on a variety of levels—lin...
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Edmund Blair B. posted an article on Babel's Dawn - Jun 30, 2011, 4:16 pm
Check out the new Facebook page for my forthcominng  book. It will get busier and more interactive as publication date (September) gets closer.
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Edmund Blair B. posted an article on Babel's Dawn - Jun 26, 2011, 11:45 pm
In his autobiography, Bastard Tongues, Derek Bickerton said that most science papers don't lead to anything, either for the author or for others. I suppose that's so, but papers as a class remain the seeds of science. That's where ideas and facts are passed around. I'm not sure how many ...
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Edmund Blair B. posted an article on Babel's Dawn - Jun 19, 2011, 11:45 pm
  I'm growing more excited about my book, due out this September. I've begun to get some good blurbs and hope for more. As part of the prologue to publication I think from time to time I will post a video on YouTube in which I discuss an aspect of the blog and book. Today's post is the ...
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Edmund Blair B. posted an article on Babel's Dawn - Jun 12, 2011, 11:45 pm
Orchids adapted to the needs of butterflies and vice versa. Coevolution fits things together. How did that work in the coevolution of human biology and culture. As I reported last week, the latest issue of Human Biology is devoted to language origins, with a particular focus on "genetic ...
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Edmund Blair B. posted an article on Babel's Dawn - Jun 5, 2011, 11:45 pm
Did James Thurber's famous drawing hold  the clue to speech origins? New theories of language origins are not rare. Here's one that focuses on the "need" to make excuses. What is rare is an interesting one that reflects new information rather than a new bit of whimsy. Human Biology's la...
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Edmund Blair B. posted an article on Babel's Dawn - May 29, 2011, 11:45 pm
A humanized mouse can teach us many things but is  unlikely to actually talk, I've just read a review article about the Foxp2 gene and its role in the evolution of language and am happy to have been brought up to date. The big assertion in this paper is that Foxp2 is critical for learni...
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Edmund Blair B. posted an article on Babel's Dawn - May 22, 2011, 11:45 pm
David Brooks is a New York Times columnist who for some time now has been pondering over the changing view of human nature which this blog has been reporting. Last week he had a column ("Nice Guys Finish First") that considered this issue again and concluded that "cooperation permeates o...
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Edmund Blair B. posted an article on Babel's Dawn - May 15, 2011, 11:45 pm
Thomas Bayes died in 1761, but 250 years later his impact is growing. There are two dominant theories that try to explain why children are able to learn their mother tongue with such little apparent effort. One proposes that a system for using and learning language is built into the brai...
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Edmund Blair B. posted an article on Babel's Dawn - May 10, 2011, 8:15 pm
Thanks to the Replicated Typo blog I've been alerted to an MIT page summarizing a recent panel discussion on artificial intelligence. Besides Noam Chomsky, giants like Steven Pinker, Marvin Minskyand Sydney Brenner. The topic was artificial intelligence, not something this blog focuses on, although ...
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Edmund Blair B. posted an article on Babel's Dawn - May 8, 2011, 11:45 pm
Arches are part of nature. They just need a keystone to support the two sides. What's the relationship between cooperation and understanding? I ask because I've been reading a paper about simulating cooperation that studies the way verbal cooperation aids understanding. (Carl Vogel, "Int...
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Edmund Blair B. posted an article on Babel's Dawn - May 1, 2011, 11:45 pm
  The Colbert Report Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c Gestures www.colbertnation.com Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog Video Archive ...
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Edmund Blair B. posted an article on Babel's Dawn - Apr 25, 2011, 7:54 am
The presence of symbols in a culture is no evidence of the presence of language: so say six authors* (mostly generative linguists) of a paper just published in the International Journal of Evolutionary Biology. ("The Archaeological Record Speaks: Bridging Anthropology and Linguistics" is...
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Edmund Blair B. posted an article on Babel's Dawn - Apr 14, 2011, 2:00 pm
Victoria Falls on the Zambia/Zimbabwe border is near the location where the Last Common Language was spoken. Science magazine's latest issue has a paper reporting that the Last Common Language was spoken in Africa before Homo sapiens migrated to other parts of the world. All exisiting la...
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Edmund Blair B. posted an article on Babel's Dawn - Apr 10, 2011, 11:45 pm
Symbols can be "pure," referring to things within the symbolic system or that can be "applied," related to the real world. How did speakers and listeners come to understand that linguistic symbols are not pure, but refer to a reality beyond themselves? One of the big mysteries of languag...
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Edmund Blair B. posted an article on Babel's Dawn - Apr 3, 2011, 11:45 pm
Hugh Blair (1718-1800), one of the founders of the Scottish Enlightment (and a distant relative of the blogger) was an early systematic thinker concerning the evolution of language. The history of ideas becomes especially provocative when it shows people wrestling with thoughts we still ...
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Edmund Blair B. posted an article on Babel's Dawn - Mar 29, 2011, 10:26 am
A friend of mine has launched a new blog where medical  patients tell their stories. The author has been a fine medical journalist for decades and knows where to get the data. Check it out at PatientPOV.org.
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Edmund Blair B. posted an article on Babel's Dawn - Mar 27, 2011, 11:45 pm
Heroes often begin as simple people who pass a test like pulling a sword from a stone and then become the giants we know. Scientists have to be careful that they don't tell that kind of origins story themselves. Stephen Jay Gould used the sneering phrase, "just-so stories," that reduced ...
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